Happy 100th, Dada: SF celebrates influential art movement

“A Friends’ Reunion,” a 1922 oil on canvas by the German artist and Dada pioneer Max Ernst (who is shown seated, second from left).

“A Friends’ Reunion,” a 1922 oil on canvas by the German artist and Dada pioneer Max Ernst (who is shown seated, second from left).

Photo: Photo 12 / UIG Via Getty Images, UIG Via Getty Images

Photo: Photo 12 / UIG Via Getty Images, UIG Via Getty Images

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“A Friends’ Reunion,” a 1922 oil on canvas by the German artist and Dada pioneer Max Ernst (who is shown seated, second from left).

“A Friends’ Reunion,” a 1922 oil on canvas by the German artist and Dada pioneer Max Ernst (who is shown seated, second from left).

Photo: Photo 12 / UIG Via Getty Images, UIG Via Getty Images

Happy 100th, Dada: SF celebrates influential art movement

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Just over 100 years ago, on Feb. 5, 1916, a small group of artists and writers gathered in the back room of a Zurich tavern. They had been invited there by Hugo Ball, a German poet and playwright exiled in Switzerland since 1915. In a quiet announcement in the Zurich press issued three days prior, he had proposed forming the Cabaret Voltaire — “a center for artistic entertainment ... run by artists” who after daily “reunions” would provide “musical or literary performances.”

To some, the invitation must have appeared ignorant and callous; to others it no doubt arrived as a respite and a relief. Outside of neutral, alp-shielded Switzerland, Europe had been busy tearing itself to pieces, with no end in sight to the savagery. The Second Battle of Ypres, in Belgium, had introduced the use of poison gas on a mass scale in 1915; 19 days after Ball’s invitation was printed, the Battle of Verdun would start. It lasted 10 months and cost more than 700,000 French and German lives.

However it was received in the midst of this slaughter, and whether it was noticed by more than a handful of readers, Ball’s announcement would end up delivering much more than it proposed. What began that night in Zurich at the Cabaret Voltaire in a series of outrageous, artist-led performances quickly became an art movement that crossed borders, continents and oceans, negated pretty much the entire history of Western art until that time, and established roots from which the next century of aesthetic endeavor grew.

Characterized by nihilism, satire, disillusionment, protest, disgust, ridicule, iconoclasm, chance, anti-aestheticism, disorder, and a general rejection of the promises of modernity and revulsion at the excesses of Western civilization — in short, the only appropriate responses to the obscenities of the First World War — this movement is known as Dada. As espoused by some of its principal figures, including Marcel Duchamp, Max Ernst, Man Ray and Beatrice Wood, Dada relies on jokes, nonsense and a heightened sense of the absurd, but it should be taken very seriously. To ignore it or to scoff at it is to risk missing out on the past 100 years of cultural production in the West. And starting Nov. 1 at City Lights Bookstore, there is no need for anyone in the Bay Area who still breathes, blinks or burps to run this risk.

For the first two weeks of November, the Dada World Fair will give the people of San Francisco the opportunity to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the emergence of Dada and experience firsthand its radical rejection of the present.

Under the direction of City Lights Booksellers and Publishers and with the help of partnering institutions that include the Consulate General of Switzerland, the Mechanics’ Institute Library and the Weinstein Gallery, the Dada World Fair will present lectures, roundtables, performances, film screenings and art installations on and within the Dadaist “tradition.”

The opening salvo in what’s being called a “13-day attack on consensus reality” will be a performance of 13 Dada Manifestos at City Lights Bookstore. Subsequent events include “The Pataphysics of Dada,” a “Pre Post-Human Dada Salon,” a “Cabaret Voltaire Tribute,” an interactive floating installation titled “Dada at Sea,” a lecture on “Destruction and the Unmasking of the 20th Century,” a “Neo-Dada Collage Exhibition,” “Cine-Dada” (screenings of films produced by key figures in the Dada movement), a “De-Election Night Soiree,” a “Dada Séance” and a “Dada Bordello.”

Among those who will participate in the fair are authors Andrei Codrescu, Chinaka Hodge and Kevin Killian, the anarchic Cacophony Society, and the Conspiracy of Beards, the male choir that performs a cappella arrangements of Leonard Cohen songs.

The Dada World Fair is largely the brainchild of Peter Maravelis, events director at City Lights, who perceives a Dadaist thread running throughout the tapestry of San Francisco’s history.

“Dada arrived in San Francisco with Emperor Norton,” Maravelis said, citing the 19th century San Franciscan who proclaimed himself emperor of the United States. “His platform was pure Dada. He was followed by successive generations of artists, writers and performers who for all practical purposes lived and breathed in the spirit of Dada. The Beats took the ball and ran with it. ... Through the ’60s, the thread of this ‘Dada strain’ made its way to fluxus, situationism, mail-art, punk, DIY, and indie publishing and music culture.”

Martin Schwartz, coordinator of public diplomacy and cultural affairs for the Consulate General of Switzerland (a primary collaborator on the fair), underscores the relationship between San Francisco and Zurich, where Dada was born. Not only are they sister cities, Schwartz said, but “San Francisco and Zurich have a tremendous amount in common, from the general scale and physical beauty of the two cities, to their world-class higher-education institutions, to their brave and open-minded approaches to culture and their booming technological sectors.” The fair, he added, “offers a wonderful occasion to highlight these ties, while taking in the truly weird and revolutionary in art as produced by both cities.”

Ralph Lewin, executive director of the Mechanics’ Institute, said, “It makes sense that San Francisco would be at the center of this centennial. The (fair’s) combination of wacky, fun and intellectually challenging ingredients speak to the soul of San Francisco” — and to the programming at the institute, he adds, which “will soon be home to a DaDa Art Gallery and Bar on its ground floor.”

San Francisco’s avant-garde pedigree aside, isn’t there a dissonant and profoundly anti-Dadaist note in the very idea of a Dada centennial, especially one held in a city roiled by income inequality and held siege by some of the highest real estate prices in the known world? What would Hugo Ball say? Maravelis is blunt on this charge, as only a Dadaist could be: “For all practical purposes, Dada is dead. ... The early Dadaists would denounce our efforts as useless and futile. They would disavow any connection to their pedigree, denouncing the idea of pedigree, in and of itself.”

And yet, says Maravelis, Dadaists would recognize our world: “They would shake their heads in horror at our age of hyper-regulated yet disastrous living. Smartphones that track your moves as well as your biological rhythms. Drones blowing hordes of people to bits every hour on the hour. Refugees roaming the planet. They had their own versions.”

Which is precisely why, he adds, “We need Dada now, more than ever.” For Maravelis, the Dada World Fair “has little to do with a reinvention or resurrection of Dada. ... This celebration is an anticelebration. It is fundamentally anti-Dada at its core. Dada is dead, but we celebrate what comes next.”

What might that be, and where might it lead us? “Ed Snowden was Dada, WikiLeaks was Dada,” Maravelis says. “You may be Dada ... but not know it.”

There’s only one way to find out, and it begins Nov. 1 at City Lights.

Timothy Don is co-founder of the Oakland Book Festival and art editor of Lapham’s Quarterly. He recently opened Gallery 2301 in Oakland.